Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Apple Silicon M1 as a Service
Spin up a Mac Mini M1 in the cloud.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites. Apple Silicon M1 as a Service launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
The New Mac Mini▲108Apple's newest Mac Mini with the latest M1 chip
2020 · apple.com · its alternatives →
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- 4TA
1. Single universal binary, that can be natively executed on every hardware platform Mac OS X was made for (32/64 bit, PowerPC/x86/AppleSilicon). 2. Minimalistic gadget-style design. If launched as a tool, there is no menubar, no dock icon, no nothing, just the clock window. 3. Support for hidpi and dark mode for environments, that have them. 4. Window title bar for moving the window with a mouse, and a handle to resize it (latter for OS versions, that have it). 5. Can be easily ported to GNUStep and thus other OSes (sources under GPLv3). 6. Simple Makefile build system.
2022 · tycho.sytes.net · its alternatives →
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Test your apps for compatibility before you buy an M1 Mac
2021 · doesitarm.com · its alternatives →
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Check game compatibility & performance on the new M1 Macs 🎮
2020 · applesilicongames.com · its alternatives →
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Clock mini▲100Tiny Tanks brings quick desktop battles to macOS: patrol to earn gold, upgrade range/cooldown/repair speed, and jump into fast fights in seconds.
2018 · airwolfspace.com · its alternatives →
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BaseRT▲2226.4x faster than llama.cpp, 3.9x faster than MLX
Jul 2026 · basecompute.co · its alternatives →
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Securely run operating systems on your Mac
2021 · mac.getutm.app · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN, I built a specialized inference engine for running 4-bit Gemma 4 26B-A4B-IT on any M-series Mac using about 2 GB of RAM. It is called TurboFieldfare and is written in Swift and Metal. I have always adored on-device AI. It feels like magic that you can run a powerful NN on your Mac or iPhone. So I wanted to push the limits a bit and run a model whose weights don’t fit in memory. The model’s 4-bit quantized weights occupy roughly 14 GB, which makes running it with conventional inference tools almost impossible on an 8 GB or even 16 GB Mac once the OS, applications, and KV cache are…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The latest Mac Mini, now with the M2 pro chip
2023 · apple.com · its alternatives →
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About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training. Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh. Then I put it on the shelf. When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Cloud hosting is convenient but costly. Here
2025 · lab.workhub.so · its alternatives →
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Ollama v0.19▲410Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX
Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
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We just open-sourced Lume - a tool we built after hitting walls with existing virtualization options on Apple Silicon. No GUI, no complex stacks - just a single binary that lets you spin up macOS or Linux VMs via CLI or API. Why we built Lume: - Run native macOS VMs in 1 command, using Apple Virtualization.Framework: `lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest` - Prebuilt images on https://ghcr.io/trycua (macOS, Ubuntu on ARM) - API server to manage VMs programmatically `POST /lume/vms` - A python SDK on github.com/trycua/pylume Run prebuilt macOS images in just…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Easily track planned Apple Silicon support for macOS apps
2021 · isapplesiliconready.com · its alternatives →
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- 21MO
2018 · micromdm.io · its alternatives →
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MacMonitor▲106Real-time Apple Silicon system monitor for your menu bar
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →